“Well in the last few years, Beaker and I have taken off on… and have been on quite a spiritual pilgrimage. First of all, moving into reading the Bible for what it really says, rather than what we think it says. Going back and really trying to take a second look at the whole thing going, ‘Rather than just when we get to the parts of the Bible that don’t make sense to us, rather than just glibing over them, let’s really look at that seriously,’ and that was quite a challenge.
"Another thing that has happened is when you’re a Christian musician and you travel around from one place to another and you’re involved with all kinds of different flavors of Christianity, you’re constantly being judged by people. If you go to a charismatic church and you don’t speak in tongues, the people say you don’t have the Holy Spirit. If you go to a fundamentalist church and you do speak in tongues people say that you’re demon possessed or that you’re some kind of emotional ecstatic or those kinds of things. If you believe in water baptism, you know one group of people will say that that defies the grace of God. If you believe in being saved by faith then people will say that well you’re denying the reality of the… blah, blah, blah. Everywhere you go people are badgering you to change your beliefs. One of the things we both realized is that, boy, you cannot answer to everybody.
"In an attempt to make Christ our Lord even more, we really tried to plug into a local church here in Wichita, which is part of the denomination that I grew up in, and really study what that church believes and then, really try to follow as closely as we can in our own lives those beliefs. And in the process what we’ve done is gone through and said, ‘Okay, here are all the issues that people argue about and here are all the hot buttons; here’s where the controversy lies. What do we believe is really essential in Christianity? Where do we think the meat and potatoes of our faith really is?’ And what we came up with was strikingly like the Apostles Creed. And, our church is a non-creedal church. We don’t recite any creed in our church. (The church is in fact is a little proud of being non-creedal.) But, when we looked at what we together and separately had said, ‘Boy, here are the things that we cannot compromise on.’ You know, I don’t have to worry too much about what I believe about say whether you should tithe or whether you should give a hundred percent. I don’t have to worry a whole lot about whether you’re allowed to go out on a Saturday night or whether you’re supposed to stay in on Saturday night. These are not things that make or break our faith. Here are the things that are absolutely essential and here are things that we can’t jimmy on. These are the things we can’t compromise. These are the things that if we were to lose this, we would no longer have a faith that is genuinely grounded and rooted in historic Christianity.
"And looking at our list, and then looking at the various creeds that the people of the ancient church had come up with we went, ‘Wow! It is wonderful and remarkable that the Truth, when you let the dust settle from all the other nitpicky things that people want to spend their lives arguing over, when you let all that settle, the truth really looks very much the same in the 20th Century as it did in the 1st Century or whenever the Church first began to formally state it’s beliefs.’
"And so, we were on a plane and we were going to the Apostle’s Creed and, interestingly enough, both Calvin’s 'Institutes' and Karl Barth’s 'Dogmatics' really is an examination of the Apostle’s Creed. So, two major theologians, one would be a very early one and one would be a fairly recent one looked at the Apostle’s Creed specifically as being a thing worth looking into. And it’s not because either of those men or any of us believe that reciting a creed will save you. I think the value of the Creed is not in the creed itself, but it’s in those things that the creed gives witness to.
"And for me, it is wonderfully refreshing to be able to say, ‘This is what I believe in. Because I believe in these things, I have lined myself up, not only with the truth because those things are true, but I’ve lined myself up with generations and generations of people who have clung to the same realities. And, I am not alone in my faith even though I may feel overwhelmed at times by people who are skeptical or overwhelmed by people who are… maybe their focus is not here. I am lined up with Augustine, I am lined up with Calvin and I’m not a Calvinist, I’m not an Augustinian, but on these issues which are the central and essential issues of the Faith, we’re all lined up,’ and boy that feels good!” ~Rich Mullins, Radio Interview, May 28, 1994 (WCBW St. Louis).
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